Just One Question | Lissa Rankin: Can Healing Our Trauma Heal Our Bodies?

About this episode

Physician Lissa Rankin says trauma doesn't just live in the mind, it can trigger measurable physical disease, from autoimmune conditions to chronic illness that conventional medicine can't explain. But her most provocative claim is the reverse: that healing the nervous system may be the missing piece in reversing illnesses that have resisted every other treatment. Dr. Rankin, a physician and author of Sacred Medicine and the New York Times bestseller Mind Over Medicine, has spent years studying the link between the nervous system and self-healing, including polyvagal theory and the ventral vagal branch of the vagus nerve. In this conversation with Tami Simon, she widens the definition of trauma well beyond childhood wounds to include systemic racism, environmental toxins, and the everyday stress of simply living in the world today. In this conversation, Tami and Lissa explore: • Why Dr. Rankin believes trauma and chronic illness are intrinsically connected • How polyvagal theory and the vagus nerve point to a physical mechanism for healing • Why "developmental trauma" can affect even people who had privileged childhoods • How collective traumas — like systemic racism and white-b